Book review: The Lost Books of the Odyssey

Growing up in Greece, with Greek mythology someting I've been very familiar with all my life, I'm generally interested to see it reworked and reinvented, so Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey seemed interesting, and often it is. The idea behind it is that it presents fragments of lost versions (not just of the Odyssey, in fact, but quite often of the Iliad as well) which occasionally provide a different angle or context for the events in Homer's epics, but for the most part present an alternate universe entirely: One where the Greeks lost the Trojan War, or won it much faster, or in a different way; Odysseus' journey home ending with Penelope having long since married one of her other suitors, or Ithaca deserted, or his travels going on forever.

Inevitably not all of the stories were to my taste, and the ones where Mason opts for quite a self-consciously literary style didn't do much for me, but there were a few alternate worlds I really liked - some of my favourites saw Odysseus' travels end as the Odyssey says, only for him to be unable to settle after so long away and set off again to revisit past glories and disasters; a retelling of parts of the Theseus myth that for the most part seems unrelated to the Odyssey until it slots in as quite a vital element; and a story that mixes Greek and Jewish mythology to have the invincible Achilles as a golem created by Odysseus to help the Greeks win the war, and the ways that affects the Achilles myth as we think we know it.